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TV, everybody. Welcome Tony Snow's history. It 100 years ago today on the 21st of November 1920, blood flowed in the streets of Dublin during the Anglo Irish War, the Irish War of Independence. There was a crescendo today that became known as Bloody Sunday. First, the IRA struck targeted killing, the assassination of British intelligence agents, spies. Then in the afternoon, ill disciplined British troops opened fire on a crowd in and around Croke Park, a huge sporting stadium on the outskirts of the city centre of Dublin.

It was a day that would go down in infamy 100 years on. I talked to Dermot Ferriter. He's one of Ireland's best known historians. He's professor of history at University College Dublin. As you'll hear, a phenomenal historian and communicator. It's a great, great privilege to have known, having admired him for so many years.

We talked about Bloody Sunday, what it meant on both sides, the Irish Sea and all over the world, and its resonance 100 years on.

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In the meantime, everybody enjoy Dommett Farat.

Thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Lovely to be here. Tell me about the situation one hundred years ago coming into the autumn winter of twenty twenty, what was the context in Ireland?

Well, the Irish War of Independence had started in early 1919, but 1919 was a relatively quiet year. The IRA campaign against Britain was not quite at full scale then. The IRA was very poorly resourced and it was struggling to coordinate a nationwide campaign. What happens in 1920, however, is that it becomes a much more concerted campaign and things really escalate towards the end of 1920. This is obviously just one part of the imperial jigsaw for Britain in 1920.

They've concerns about various parts of the empire, but they're really struggling to contain the bad news from Ireland. What the IRA is engaging in is a very dangerous guerrilla campaign, really attack and retreat. It has certain advantages when it's facing British ground forces. It's seen very much as a hidden enemy. Many of the IRA are moving about in civilian garb, and they have a very effective director of organisation, Michael Collins, who, of course, becomes one of the best known characters in the War of Independence period.

And he's concerned about any British efforts to penetrate the Irish intelligence efforts in the IRA's intelligence efforts. And what has been the strategy really far from Michael Collins is to try and take out British intelligence agents or suspected British intelligence agents in Ireland. So that's just one part of the Irish War of Independence. There's also a political war of independence going on. Sinn Fein are seeking to gain recognition internationally for an Irish republic. So this military campaign is in tandem with our political campaign.

And it's also, of course, a propaganda battle. And that really has intensified by 19 20. Sinn Fein is very effective in trying to communicate the message widely that Britain's contention that it is controlling its Irish problem and has its Irish question under control is a nonsense. So what's happening by late? Nineteen twenty is reprisal counter reprisal. The flooding of Ireland with British crown forces. There's already a Reuters constabulary, which is the established police force in Ireland, which is being augmented by extra forces, the famous Black and Tans, and then another force, the auxiliaries who are ex British army officers who are really an elite strike force, who seek to take the war to the IRA.

And that's a huge impact, obviously, on civilians as well. So if you throw all of those ingredients into the melting pot, what you get in Ireland by 1920 and the autumn of 1920 is truly toxic. When it comes to the battlefield, is this a struggle like many anti imperial insurgencies where the big cities are important? So perhaps, you know, your Cork and Dublin, or is this a rural thing?

Are we seeing like Mayo, Kerry, West Cork, those part of the country has just become no go areas for British troops?

Well, the problem for Britain is that there isn't a battlefield on the kind of warfare that they have been used to, particularly during the First World War. You know, open combat, you know, the very existence of a battlefield that doesn't exist in. The dynamics are very much based on the regional realities. You refer to certain counties there in the province of Munster. You can consider Cork and Kerry or the west of Ireland in Mayeux. These are areas that are very, very difficult to control for Britain, their rural communities.

A lot of the police barracks are very isolated. A lot of the British crown forces are holed up in their barracks and then they come out on their attacks on the fighters, disappear into the surrounding terrain. So it's a very complicated theatre of war for Britain. And of course, the IRA does not have the resources, does not have the manpower, and that the British have what they have knowledge of the terrain. They have a degree of support from the local community who are prepared to harbor them and assist them.

But that's not always, of course, a blanket endorsement. So it is a complicated type of warfare. And you've got to break Ardern down into different regions to try and study the impact of the war of independence. There are parts of the country that were relatively quiet, but those particular counties, the warfare is more intense. And then the cities, of course, are important. I mean, Tottenham was a small complexity. It still is. It has a warren of streets that the IRA can use very effectively.

And that's where the intelligence war becomes interesting because they were trying to identify where British intelligence agents were based in Dublin City. But boarding houses or hotels or lodgings they may have been staying in. And of course, they had a very detailed knowledge of the IRA, of the movement of the enemy. And that was something that Britain called master to the same extent.

Is it important that we're now in the 20th century, we're now in a sort of proto democratic landscape, these insurgencies traditionally both in Ireland and elsewhere in the world, it would have just been waited out, shoot enough people, go on punitive raids and then business as normal. Is that something is the British government now funding this enemy? It can't defeat because of the propaganda battle, because of the of reputation, because of the idea that these sort of methods of counter-insurgency no longer acceptable, particularly in that period against, quote unquote, a white race.

But I mean, Britain prided itself on being a liberal power. And I mean, David Lloyd George obviously has his attention focused on a variety of different matters in 1920, Ananda's only one of them. But his contention before 1920 is that the problem in Ireland is a policing problem, that it's not a military problem. No, he is getting representations from senior military figures, including General Neville McCreedy, who is the commander of the British forces in Ireland, who are saying, well, hang on a sec.

Now, this has moved beyond a policing problem and you have to respond in kind or to respond in kind would be for the British government to admit that the problem is much bigger than they're prepared to admit and they actually ignore it a lot. It's a struggle for some of the Dublin Castle personnel, Dublin Castle in the centre of British administration in Ireland to get the British cabinet interested enough in Ireland, are focused enough on arms. And David Lloyd George, of course, in November 1920 before Bloody Sunday, refers to the IRA as a small murder gang and asserts that we have murder by the throat.

So that was part of the British propaganda effort to maintain that the IRA was just a small crowd of cowardly assassins and that this was not serious conventional warfare. But it becomes more and more difficult to keep the bad news off the pages of the newspapers. I think one of the underwritten aspects of this, the role of journalists, British journalists in armed at that time, people like John Hammond from the Manchester Guardian, the forerunner of today's Guardian, or Hugh Martin of the Daily News.

They're sending back objective reports as to what is happening in Ireland and the burning of villages and the shootings and the impact on civilians and the house raids. And that's a narrative that's completely at odds with what is being asserted publicly. So, yes, that becomes very, very difficult for Britain. Sinn Fein has quite a sophisticated propaganda outfit. They have what's called the Irish Fullarton, which was their version of what was happening in Ireland, which has been sent to newspapers worldwide in nineteen twenty in nineteen twenty one.

And that begins to again compromise the British assertions of Ireland's just being a minor irritant. And ultimately it's events like Bloody Sunday, most notoriously Bloody Sunday, that lead to screaming headlines that suggest Britain is not containing this problem.

Well, that's come to Bloody Sunday itself. People might be familiar with the Bloody Sunday. There have been too many bloody Sundays in the world, let alone in Ireland over the last over the last century. This one we're not talking about 1972 in Derry. We are talking about November 21, 1920. And as you mentioned, Michael Collins and his laser focus on British intelligence. That's where this particular story begins, probably as it Collins decided that he was going to appoint what becomes known as the squad, these are units of the Dublin Brigade of the IRA who are charged with the task of taking out those who have the potential to penetrate the IRA, the British intelligence agents, or suspected intelligence agents.

Now, we don't know exactly how many British intelligence agents were in Dublin or in Ireland in 1920. By its very nature of this kind of work is obviously not advertised by those who were engaged in it. But it's estimated that there would have been in the region of one hundred British intelligence agents in Ireland by the end of 1920. And Michael Collins begins to use his various contacts, including in Dublin Castle, to try and compile lists of who they are and where they are on their movements.

And he makes them a very, very audacious decision to try and take them out on the morning of the 21st of November 19 20. These are very young IRA members that deliberately picked because they don't have families. They're young volunteers who are told about the seriousness of these planned engagements. And the idea is to be audacious is to take the war to British intelligence and to try and take them out in one fell swoop. And that's what happens on the morning.

I mean, the scenes that were witnessed in the various addresses that these IRA members go to. There were hotels and lodging houses are horrific. Many of them are pajama clad. This is not expected. This kind of thing hasn't happened before because they happened to try to do this in the actual residences of these suspected agents. And it wasn't about pinpoint, selective, successful assassination. I mean, mistakes were made, nerves betrayed some of the IRA members, but they did manage to kill 14 of them.

And sometimes those who were killed because they were in such intimate domestic settings, they were killed in front of loved ones as well. So some terrifying scenes and that caused shock and panic in Dublin at that time. The news begins to spread across the city of the events of the morning. And the question then is how it is going to be responded to. And that leads to the second half of Bloody Sunday.

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And that second half is very different to the kind of surgical assassinations or surgical strikes of the morning. In fact, it couldn't be more different.

No, I mean, Croke Park was the headquarters of the Gaelic Athletic Association, which was Ireland's largest sporting organization, which promoted Gaelic football hurling. And there was a match that had been planned for the afternoon. And again, that the game had the capacity to generate very considerable crowds of spectators, such as the popularity of its sports. This was a football match between Tipperary and children who were two of the strongest football teams in Ireland at that time. And it was a challenge match.

It was a friendly much in the region of 10000 thousand people were in attendance at Croke Park and it just off the city centre in Dublin. And the match begins. And it seems the original plan was to send British crown forces. And this is a combination of Reiners, Canterbury, Black and Tans and Auxiliaries to send them in to the grounds because of what has happened in the morning to stop the game and to search all of the men in attendance to see if they could gather any evidence as to their involvement in the events of the morning.

But that doesn't happen. What happens instead is that when they arrive around the perimeter of Croke Park, discipline completely breaks down. And whether it's rage or a loss for revenge or just plain fury, it manifests itself in just 90 seconds of shooting. And it's indiscriminate shooting and 14 people are killed. There's a stampede. Some people are crushed and impaled. Some people are shot in the back. It's a mixture of children, one woman, armed men, indiscriminate shooting for 90 seconds.

And that damage is inflicted or damages inflicted to that scale. And again, the scenes are absolutely horrendous. I mean, much more of a sense now of the personal stories behind the individual victims. They were mostly working class people from very humble abodes in the vicinity of Croke Park in Dublin. And the terror was felt across the city. And later that evening, there are three further killings when two IRA men who had been taken into custody and another individual who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, they were tortured and murdered.

And that meant that the death toll on Bloody Sunday was thirty one. So thirty one people killed in a single day in Dublin. And if you look at the contemporary newspaper reports of these events, they use words like Holocaust and slaughter and massacre. And that was the scale of what happened. You referred to Bloody Sunday there in nineteen seventy two, the second Bloody Sunday that was often referred to as generating this communal wound in Ireland. But that was true of the first Bloody Sunday also.

So this is a terrifying day. It really is a day of terror. 19 20 is remembered in our nation's history as the year of terror.

One of the more infamous moments is an armoured car fired allegedly over the heads of the crowd and inevitably when those bullets carry. So this was not just individuals firing. This would have felt like state terror.

Oh, there's no doubt about that. And you see, this has been bubbling under the surface for quite some time. You know, the frustration of the ground forces, but also the lack of a unified security command in Ireland at that time. I mean, Britain's failings were many on that front. Who is in charge, you know, who is in charge of discipline? The Black and Tans have developed a reputation for indiscipline and brutality. And here we now have the auxiliaries who were engaging in the same.

Who is in charge is a key question, you know, whatever about the intelligence efforts and the blow that was inflicted in the morning. That afternoon's events really highlighted the lack of coordination and the lack of control over the British ground forces and armed at that time.

It's fascinating to have people on this podcast queuing up every week to tell me that the British army in 1918, the famous victories against the German army was probably pound for pound, the best British army that had ever been in history. And yet two years later, this is just like the most shambolic, indiscriminate indiscipline of rabble that was attempting to fight this war in Ireland. It's a mystery.

It's not a mystery, though, in the sense that if you look at some of the accounts we have that have survived in, say, the Imperial War Museum in London, for example, the British crown forces who were in Ireland at that time, you know, they do underline how different Ireland was. And they didn't understand the Irish question. They didn't understand the communities that they were supposedly there to police or protect. There's also a degree of racism, inevitably.

I mean, they have their own prejudices about the Irish anyway. And, you know, much of what happens confirms for them the impossibility of dealing with the Irish. So it's a combination of all of those things. But we also know now that there were regular trips to London by the top military brass in Ireland who were saying this is what we need to do to deal with this problem. We need to sweep across the country and a much more severe way.

Well, what their political masters were telling them was that that was not acceptable. For political reasons. So what the military wanted to do in Ireland, they were not allowed to do for political reasons, but they still end up falling between two different stools. So it is a complete mess. Bloody Sunday does lead to a reorganization of the British effort and indeed of British intelligence. And it was probably better than it was given credit for in some Republican narratives.

And there was also, I suppose, a reluctance to acknowledge some of the mistakes that the IRA made on Bloody Sunday morning, because you have to keep intact the founding myth and the glorious myth of how the Irish state was created. So a lot of those complications were glossed over. But at the same time, this is also an event, I think, like the later Bloody Sunday as well, that does force a reassessment of the long term objectives.

Downing Street wants this problem off its table and an event on the scale of Bloody Sunday makes that more likely. It does lead to a reassessment. Why are we doing in Ireland and how can we get away out? And we already know that even before Bloody Sunday, there were some tentative links being established with senior Sinn Fein or some who were regarded as more moderate within the Sinn Fein movement. Arthur Griffiths, for example, who was the vice president of Sinn Fein at that time, he was in communication with C.J. Phillips and the British Foreign Office.

And C.J. Phillips refers to the slender link that has been established. So could there be a path to dialogue? And remember, Raymond Valera, the president of Sinn Fein, is actually in America at that time. So does that kind of international efforts by Sinn Fein. This event gives them a further opportunity to decry the British mistakes. But there are always things going on behind the scenes and there are always those who are active in trying to open up channels of negotiation, including Andy Koepp, who was an assistant undersecretary who was establishing links with Sinn Fein, was in the Catholic Church to try and open up that path.

And I think Bloody Sunday reinforces the determination to try and make more of that.

You're right, of course, that it's not a mystery. I mean, we know from our own times, U.S. and allied forces, it's one thing to defeat conventional enemies in the field, you know, and in 1918, that meant crashing through the Hindenburg line with brilliant artillery support. It's quite another thing to practice. Very complex counterinsurgency, as we've seen from our own era, can make one military look like two very different militaries.

Can I ask you've mentioned the effect out of London. I'm sure David Lloyd George is the old radical.

The last thing he ought to be doing was fighting a repressive war within the borders.

Well, I'll tell you, he had very little sympathy for the intelligence agents who were killed on Bloody Sunday morning.

He was actually quite scathing about the beyond Lloyd-Jones that you mentioned and indeed the British and Irish leaders. What about the sort of war for hearts and minds? You know, we're always told that the post office uprising of 1916 was actually the response in Ireland was mixed until the rebels were shot in the prison courtyard. Is that true of Bloody Sunday or was this a moment when more and more of the Irish became convinced that they didn't want anything to do with the British state?

Well, it's not quite as black and white as that. You've got to remember, there would have been a lot of revulsion about what had happened in the morning. Don't assume that all committed Irish Republicans approve what the IRA did on Bloody Sunday morning. I mean, this was taking the terror to a new level. And, of course, this isn't about two equal sides. You know, this is not about an equivalence between the Irish military effort and the British military effort.

You know, the Irish are obviously dealing with great disadvantages in terms of resources and power. But nonetheless, there was still a concern about reaching this new level that they were prepared to go in and kill people like that. But in a sense, what happened in the afternoon neutralized whatever misgivings or revulsion may have been felt about what had happened in the morning. And of course, there were always those who were pleased that a British body count, no matter how it was performed.

So it is quite a mix, but certainly an event on the scale of Bloody Sunday just reinforced for many Irish people the complete inability of Britain to understand the nature of the Irish question or to recognise the validity of the Irish claim for self-determination, which let's not forget, of course, you know, had been endorsed by the December 19, 18 general election. I mean, Sinn Fein had a political mandate to achieve an Irish republic. The question is how you combine that political mandate with the military operations.

And there isn't a always centralized control of the Irish Republican efforts. A lot of the soldiers within the Irish Republican Army think very little of the politicians and are not necessarily listening to them. So it's quite a difficult balancing act. But what someone like Aymond believed was that you needed spectacular so-called Irish spectaculars to shine an international light on Ireland, to embarrass and even humiliate the British government. So getting that balance right is very, very tricky. And, of course, Bloody Sunday is by no means the end of it.

I mean, when we talk about what we would call today a kind of a peace process and we talk about the channels towards peace or dialogue, we don't get a truce until July 1921. So Bloody Sunday does focus minds, but there's still a lot of this war to be played out. And only a week after Bloody Sunday, the IRA in Cork killed 17 auxiliary. And Michael in Cork in a single ambush, in a single event, and again, that was a huge body count for Britain and a hugely embarrassing.

So there are still a lot of tragedies to play out. But I think at the same time, Bloody Sunday was a turning point.

Well, thank you for talking to us about that turning point and would be wonderful to have you back on and talk about the peace process into 2021 and the eventual partition of the island of Ireland. Have you got a book out at the moment? Tell us about it.

Well, at the moment, I'm working on the Civil War. We're living through this decade of commemorations on centenaries. So there'll be a lot of focus over the next year or two on the end of the Irish War of Independence, the beginning of dialogue with Britain, the signing of the Treaty on the Anglo-Irish Treaty in December. Nineteen twenty one, of course, led to civil war. So that's where I'm heading next. Gerry Times not cheery at times.

Well, thank you very much indeed for joining us.

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